As mythical mother of the nine classical muses, Mnemosyne was mother of all the arts and sciences. By inference, she was the founder of all language too, since she was said to have discovered the uses of the powers of reason and to have given names or designations to all things. The languages of art and science of molecular biology are continually reconstructed with names and determinations for things never before seen or imagined. A paradox of reference is inevitably encountered because we are constrained to use concepts and vocabularies invented in the past to describe facts at hand. Obsolete paradigms tend to be incorporated with the very ideas that have overturned them, leaving many people automatically confused. Ethical and philosophical problems stemming from inevitable misinterpretations plague artists and scientists who choose to represent a universe we cannot now and may never completely understand. An effort to sequence the genome of Malus sieversii, an apple shown to be ancestral to all domestic cultivars is presented in this context.

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ALSO:

All Saints Cinema

7:30 Friday, March 1Q&A following screening with Joe Davis and director Peter SasowskyEvent is FREE and open to the public!

Synopsis: Thirty years ago, a peg-legged motorcycle mechanic walked into the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT. They had not returned his calls. The police were summoned. Forty-five minutes later he walked out with an academic appointment. Since then Joe Davis has sent vaginal contractions into space to communicate with aliens, encoded poetry into DNA, and designed a sculpture to save the world. It’s a great life for a man driven by imagination – except when it’s not. No one pays him. He is evicted from apartments and labs. His uncompromising approach to art and life collides with the world’s banal requirements. This is a story of self-discovery, sacrifice and the complexity of human endeavor, of the price of art and the ecstatic joy of discovery.